That's men for you Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's healthDo you bitch and whinge to the missus when you have had a bad day at work? If not, you should.
Does she bitch and whinge to you about her day? And do you listen to her? Again, if not, she should and you should.
A new study in Canada, at the University of Toronto, has provided further evidence that being the strong, silent type is not all it's cracked up to be. The study found that if you are under strain at work, and your spouse doesn't listen to your complaints, your blood pressure rises over a period of a year. But if your spouse listens to you and coos sympathetically, your blood pressure will go down.
Why this should be so, we do not know. But it does show that talking, and being listened to, actually works.
The research covered a wide range of workers at the University of Toronto Health Sciences Centre, ranging from doctors to maintenance workers, and it also included visitors to the hospital.
The researchers described "job strain" as a condition caused by a mixture of high demands and little scope for personal decisions. An example might be a nurse in an operating theatre, who is meeting other people's needs and demands all the time but who has little or no scope for making personal decisions such as when to go for a lunch break.
The researchers set out to discover whether something they called "marital cohesion" affected the blood pressure levels of people in this situation. Marital cohesion, according to the researchers, depends largely on the amount of support given at home by one partner to the other.
Support means that the partners talk about their daily activities and that one partner pays attention to, and sympathises with, the other when he or she has had a bad day. This, of course, also involves spending time with the other person.
As mentioned above, the effects of this kind of support were measurable in terms of blood pressure. Those who did not have good support at home, saw their systolic blood pressure rise by 2.8mmHg over one year. Those who had the support saw their blood pressure fall by 2.5mmHg over a year.
There are, let's face it, guys who arrive home after a day in the corporate jungle, who only want to dive into the TV screen and who have no interest in talking to their wives about what has happened during their day. Neither do they have any interest in hearing what has happened to the wife. Equally, there are wives who have absolutely no interest in hearing what has gone on in their husband's life that day and they may see little point in telling him what has gone on in theirs.
I am assuming here that both partners are in the workplace. But if, say, the wife is a full-time mother, the importance of this kind of support for both of them remains. She can still listen to and sympathise with her husband, even though she is not out in the great world of commerce and he is. He can listen to and sympathise with her troubles and stresses and strains during the day.
It is in no way helpful nor does it make any sense for either partner to discount the other's troubles. The wife who says "you should try dealing with these kids for a whole day and then you would know all about stress" or the husband who says "sure what would you know about stress anyhow, sitting around gossiping all day" are both wrong and missing the point.
Of course, listening to your significant other, banging on about the crimes of the production department or of how they were stuck in traffic on the way to school to pick up little Johnny is not necessarily the sort of way either of them wants to spend their free time. But whether they like it or not, it is still worth doing. Just chalk it up to love.
pomorain@irish-times.ie
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.